WoW, a blog from me!

Hello to the 3 people that are probably reading this. I've decided to have a go at entering the exciting world of typing random crap for the Internet to read. This blog is going to be primarily focused on World of Warcraft, with the occasional posts dedicated to whatever I feel like talking about.

I am currently an Officer and Raid leader for the guild Critical Mass on the Stormreaver realm. My main is a lvl 70 Warlock named Ryanoth. These days, I seem to raid more on my lvl 70 Resto Shaman named Syrinth. I am also gearing up a lvl 70 Prot Warrior named Mysrinth, and slowly working on a rogue name Mysra who is in her 40s. I have no idea why I like to name all my characters with a "y" as the second letter, but now it is a theme! :)

Critical Mass is mostly a casual raiding guild. We are working on 25-mans 2 nights a week, and run Kara and ZA groups on off days. We have Kara and Gruul on farm, and are just stepping into SSC/TK to start learning the place. Last week was our first attempt on Void Reaver. I think it will just take a few tries to train people to run from the damn orbs.

I love my guild in general. There are some great people in it and I consider many of them friends. The officer core has been basically stable for a few years now. Several people even have started having RL get togethers with other guildies. There is one this weekend I wanted to attend, but unfortunatly I will be in St Louis.

The downfall of being in a casual raiding guild is the mix of playstyles can conflict. In a hard-core raiding guild, you can enforce strict requirements and attendance. That just doesn't work in a laid back guild. So we have a mix of hard-core raiders, PVP people, and people that are just doing whatever they feel like. I and most of the officers lean more towards being hard-core raiders. So it is frustrating when you work in your spare time to gear up by running heroics, crafting items, and farming up consumables, only to have someone in the raid only doing 300 DPS because they don't work on their toon at all outside of raids or is not PVE specced at all. While I could always go join a hard-core guild, I don't have the time to dedicate 5 nights a week to raiding, and I have far too many friends in CM. So for now, it is an adventure with trying to balance being open and friendly, but expecting people to bring their A-game to the raids.

My WoW experience in general is that I have been playing since beta. I rolled my first Warlock back when they had no talents and were laughed at. I was a free kill to any horde that wasn't mildly retarded. I specifically rolled a gnome Warlock just because it was the least played combination in the game at the time. I remember grouping for instance runs with people having never had a Warlock in their group before. I ended up becoming very interested in all the game mechanics, and am kind of a theorycraft nerd. At the time, there were no good Warlock guides out there, so I wrote one that is posted on Gamefaqs. It is horribly out of date now, but I guess was decent for it's time as I got a lot of email about it and even several offers to write for some web sites.

In future posts, I will discuss many aspects of day-to-day life in WoW. I will probably go into depth on each of the classes I play and give my opinions. Hope someone finds it informative.